


Whiskey Burn

by alphabetcities



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, drunken one night stand hate sex, just depressing, only not sexy at all, post episode 26
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-17
Updated: 2018-07-17
Packaged: 2019-06-12 02:52:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15330141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alphabetcities/pseuds/alphabetcities
Summary: In a moment of boldness, she leans forward to light her cigarette off of Keg’s. It forces their faces close together, and when she inhales, there’s the scent of Keg -whiskey and sweat and oiled plate armour- mingled in with the smoke.It has the desired effect. Beau watches Keg’s eyes flick down to the smoke curling from Beau’s lips.Beau needs a distraction, and a way to get Keg to stop trying to make her talk, and one night stand might solve both of those problems.





	Whiskey Burn

**Author's Note:**

> Dealt with my emotions over Molly's death with 2000+ words of angsty Beau character study and drunk desperate sex between two emotionally stunted women. Listen, we all handle loss differently.

It’s funny, Beau thinks, how you can spend most of your life without having a single person give a damn about you and yet never feel lonely, and then after a few short weeks with some halfway decent people, suddenly being on your own is this painful, ugly thing that hurts more than you can bear.

And by funny, she means absolutely fucking tragic.

She’s drinking, because of course she is. Alone. To the best of her knowledge, it’s just her and the bartender in the entire inn, and he keeps on vanishing off, obviously having better things to do than watch Beau drink herself half to death.  
Well, not entirely alone. In the other room there is The Body, but she doesn’t want to think about that. The Body is the exact fucking reason she’s drinking right now.

She hears the door to the bar open, and she doesn’t have to look up from her drink to tell who it is. The creaking of plate armour and the scent of stale smoke give that away pretty quickly.

“Fuck off Keg,” She mutters. “You’re the last person I want to see here.”

Keg raises an eyebrow in return. “Really? I come below Lorenzo?”

“If Lorenzo was here there’d be something I could do. And that something would probably involve punching, and it’d make me feel a whole lot better.”

Keg doesn’t answer for a while, choosing her words carefully. “I think you know that wouldn’t end well for you.” She says slowly.

“But I’d be doing _something_.”

Keg nods, like she understands, and if Beau’s honest, she probably does. They’re pretty alike, though she’s loathe to admit it. They’re both best suited to dealing with problems that can be handled with brute force. The Body, however, is not one of those kind of problems. 

“Would it be alright if I sat with you for a bit?”

“Not really.” Beau replies, but she moves her pack off the seat next to her regardless. Keg hops up onto the stool, not without some difficulty, a pulls a couple of grubby looking copper coins from her pouch. The tired looking Halfling tending the bar takes them, and leaves a glass of whiskey in their place. 

The two of them drink in silence for a little while. Keg lights up a cigarette, and offers one to Beau. She’s never been much of a smoker, but there’s a thickness in her throat she’d rather replace with a burn, so she takes it, and Keg lights it with a practised flick of a match. The light of the match illuminates Keg’s strong jawline and whiskey coloured eyes for a moment. The girl’s handsome, Beau can’t ignore that. 

She’s quite happy to sit there watching Keg’s face through the smoke and drinking her weight in bad liquor, but of course Keg feels the need to break the silence. “Where are the others?” She asks, her voice low. “Uh, Caleb, and, Nott, was it?”

“Fuck if I know.“ She’d last seen Caleb at sunrise, stood in the doorway of the room containing The Body, looking straight through it with glazed over eyes. Every few seconds his vision would slip back into focus and for a moment he’d see what was in front of him, and his breath would hitch, and then he’d disappear off into that far off place again. Over and over, ad infinitum. He’s no doubt got some new images burned into that perfect memory of his. Blood on the snow superimposed on a house in ashes, flames reflected in a pair of red, lifeless eyes. 

It was excruciating to watch, seeing Caleb slip in and out of reality with each choked sob, even worse perhaps than looking at The Body. Beau couldn’t stand more than a minute of watching it, and had slammed the door behind him. She’d heard the creak of the door opening a few hours ago, followed by the sound of footsteps, but she couldn’t bring herself to turn around, and why should she? She’s not Caleb’s keeper, that’s Nott’s fucking job, and Beau doesn’t need any of his PTSD bullshit on top of everything else going on.

Keg’s looking at her now with concern and maybe even some pity, and Beau can’t even look away because then she’d have to see the door to the room with The Body in it. Great. A rock and a fucking hard place. 

“You really think they’d cut and run?” Keg widens her eyes. In the lamplight, Beau can see how long her lashes are. It should look odd, amongst her more masculine features, but it works somehow.

“Yeah, I reckon so?” She responds. “They’ve been looking for an excuse to leave for a while now. This is about as good a reason as they’re gonna get.”

“Where do you think they’ll go?”

“I don’t know and I don’t particularly care.” It’s an obvious lie and Keg no doubt knows it, but she’s confident that Keg’s feeling too guilty to call her out on it.

“He seemed a little unstable, Caleb, I mean. Aren’t you worried he might, y’know, do something?”

“I literally just said I don’t care. And I know you don’t either, so I’m not sure why you’re asking.”

Keg shrugs her shoulders. The plates of her armour make a dull clink against each other. 

“Just trying to make conversation. You know, like uh, M-”

“Don’t you fucking dare say his name.”

Keg scowls. “Fine. But you know you’re going to have to deal with it sooner or later.”

Beau doesn’t respond. 

“I know I’m the last person you want to hear this from, you’re going to have to start making decisions about what to do next. You can’t just leave his body in a locked room and expect everything to sort itself out. In the morning he’s still going to be there, Beau. No matter how much you drink.”

“You’re right.”

“I am?”

“Yeah. You’re right that you’re the last person I want to hear this from.”

Keg snorts. “I kinda walked into that one I guess. You know your cigarette’s gone out.”

She hadn’t noticed, actually. She’s about to ask for the matches, when she sees a way to salvage this wreck of a conversation. See, Beau’s not completely dumb, she can tell when a girl is into her (or more often, is not) and she’d noticed Keg’s appreciative glances earlier in the day. Hell, Beau had even showed off a little. She’d never thought anything would come of it, but now she needs a distraction, and Keg’s attractive enough and definitely into her and more importantly right here.

And so, in a moment of boldness, she leans forward to light her cigarette off of Keg’s. It forces their faces close together, and when she inhales, there’s the scent of Keg -whiskey and sweat and oiled plate armour- mingled in with the smoke. 

It has the desired effect. Beau watches Keg’s eyes flick down to the smoke curling from Beau’s lips.

“You could have just asked for the matches.” She says, a little breathless.

“Didn’t want to.”

“What do you want?”

“To get something halfway good out of a shitty situation.”

And she takes a last draw of the cigarette, leans forward and kisses Keg. It’s a hard, messy kiss that couldn’t be farther from being romantic if it tried, and Keg’s stubble burns along Beau’s jaw but weirdly enough, Beau finds she likes it.

They break apart, and Keg looks at her intently. Her pupils are large even in the bright light of the bar lamps overhead.  
“I’m obviously not your first choice for this.”

“Nope.”

“One of your friends who got taken, you liked her right? Yasha? He mentioned it in passing, um, Mol-”

“I said don’t say his fucking name.”

“But I’m right?”

Her first instinct is to protest, but what’s the point? There’s no room for shame in a drunken hook up with an almost stranger. “Yeah.” She takes another drag. “Don’t think that I haven’t picked up on the fact that I’m not your first pick either.”

Keg shrugs, and breaks eye contact.

“It’s alright, I’m never anyone’s first choice.”

“Me neither.”

\---

Beau locks the door behind them, and Keg starts to remove her armour. It’s painfully slow, and if it takes much longer then this won’t be a distraction and Beau will be forced to remember that The Body is in the room next to them, and there’s probably something pretty fucked up about that. The whole situation is fucked up, her getting her rocks off whilst her friends rot in cages but she needs this, okay. She needs this.

She’s just about ready to leave when the last piece of plate armour clatters to the floor, but then she feels Keg’s mouth on her neck and it’s good, it’s so fucking good and why did Beau sit through that whole awkward conversation at the bar when they could have skipped straight to doing this? Everything about Keg is rough, from her calloused fingers to her scarred arms to the sandpaper texture of her jaw and every touch burns like cheap whiskey. Keg’s chapped lips kiss a line across Beau’s collarbone and Beau moans in encouragement and wraps her fingers in Keg’s curls to draw her in closer. She wants this to bruise so badly. She wants to wake in the morning to an ache somewhere other than her chest.

Keg’s kisses move lower, and her hands grip harder. She damn near tears Beau’s robe trying to expose more skin and Beau really couldn’t care less. The fucking robes can burn in the morning for all she cares. They’re drenched in blood from carrying The Body here, to the point where they’re more brown than blue. Probably not even recognisable as Cobalt Soul. She’s probably not even recognisable as Cobalt Soul. 

There’s a kind of satisfaction in the fact that, in how it’s another way her father’s failed to make her into something he wanted. She smiles at that, despite everything, and then that smile is swallowed up in a moan as Keg sucks hard on her nipple.

Beau slips one hand around Keg’s waist to pull her closer, and with the other, tries to undo the ties on Keg’s breeches. It’s slow work; her usually dexterous fingers are clumsy with alcohol, but she manages it in the end. She slips down the breeches to expose a patch of red brown hair bracketed by pale, freckled thighs. Beau reaches her hand between Keg’s legs, and in surprise Keg gasps, her teeth catching on Beau’s breast as she does so and it feels good, but also painful, and also a thousand of other emotions none of which are to do with The Body and are therefore exactly what Beau’s after.

She feels calloused fingers slide down her hips and past her waistband, and then pause there, like she’s waiting for permission. “What are you fucking waiting for?” Beau breathes out with a stuttered gasp. 

And then she feels Keg’s thumb ghost over her clit, and it feels fantastic.Even though she’s dripping wet she can still feel the roughness of Keg’s fingers through the slick. She tightens her grip on Keg’s hair, pulling them closer together still, and with the hand buried between Keg’s legs, she picks up the pace. Keg moans, with that strangely high voice that doesn’t fit her image at all, and speeds up too, slipping two thick fingers inside of Beau. 

There’s a temptation, of course, to draw this out, to let themselves give into this distraction for as long as possible, but it’s not that kind of sex, and within minutes she sees Keg’s thighs start to tremble as she comes, and shortly after Beau feels a heat pool in her own belly. Her orgasm burns through her, and she doesn’t hold back her scream. Who’s there to hear? Only Keg, and maybe the bartender if he’s still up, and The Body, the fucking body in the next room who can’t hear anything because-

And just like that, the distraction is over. She pulls herself away from Keg, and she curses the way her body misses the contact of Keg’s skin on hers. Because yeah, Beau’s a person who misses people now, just in time for her to have some to miss.

They don’t talk as they clean themselves off. 

“I can leave.” Keg says eventually, not looking Beau in the eye. “If you want. I think there’s some other rooms free.”

“I don’t care either way.”

Keg stays. It doesn’t mean anything though.

\---  
Beau wakes before Keg, to the first stirrings of sunrise. Her hangover hurts like a bitch, but her mind feels sharp as she pulls on her robes, and heads to the room where The Body lies. She’s shocked to see that Caleb and Nott are still there. The two are curled up asleep on a chair, Caleb clinging to Nott’s tiny form as if she’s the only thing anchoring him to this earth. And maybe Caleb might not be much use to anyone right now, but he’s _still here_ and that means the world to Beau, it really does.

She turns away from them, and she forces herself to look at it, to look at _him_ , properly. Not just out of the corner of her eye where the blur of purple and red could be anything, but to see him, as he really is. Her blue eyes lock with his red ones and she holds his empty gaze as long as she can, even though it makes her small and scared and sick to her stomach.

She’s done distracting herself. She’s going to go to the bar and she’s going to ask every person here if they know of a cleric nearby, no matter the cost. She’s going to buy provisions and another horse and some new robes that aren’t covered in blood. And then she’s going to wake Caleb and Nott, and she’s going to find a way to way to get Caleb out of his trance so that he can help. A slap and a kiss on the forehead maybe. It’s what The Body-

It’s what Molly would have done.


End file.
